Who is ?

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This is the start of an entirely new series on the blog and its the one that i have given the most thought as it won’t necasarily be the case that the individual will be anything to do with boats and sailing , in fact the first one has nothing to do with my usual genre at all.

What i am doing here , or at least trying to do is extend my range by talking about things and people that i find interesting (even essential) while avoiding the traps and pitfalls that i have seen recently….an example being where i feel that Dylan has gone wrong in his channel. Before even starting my blog i spent some time just studying the internet , still do that today and have i believe a reasonable idea of what i want to avoid : its harder to say what i want to achieve here except that i am trying to learn to write well and perhaps create a new internet meme of people thinking and communicating by writing rather than yapping into a microphone. In the future i would like to cover some of the people that have influenced my life in sailing and boats : the late Eric Tabarly and Peter Blake for example and that would be a great project.

Here though i want to take a sideways step and start from a different perspective that is a personal one again : just recently in my job i had to undergo what is a regular process now in the NHS ie a personal work appraisal and that is something that i have never liked except that at my age i care a lot less about the BS that such processes are based in and have a lot more fun just having an open chat with another nurse who just happens to be in the position of being my appraiser. In this example we were talking about the huge changes in my work life this year : i went from being a HCA to a registered nurse again so we obviously talked about that a lot but we also talked about things that i am thinking about and working on and one of those is my ‘intellectual’ life which is something i haven’t thought about for a long time. One reason for that is that my ‘career’ as such clearly ran out of steam and direction and just fizzled out at the end. I have never considered myself to be an ‘educated’ person for example : i left school at 16 and went into very basic low level jobs and only really started to boot-strap myself when i became a student nurse. For somebody of that training style era, essentially an apprenticeship, i did pretty well with it : i became a charge nurse and briefly a ward manager and then a high level clinical specialist nurse…at which level i was working technically beyond my ‘official’ qualification level. Just a quick story about this : when i retired and handed in my official notice i was talking with my boss (the departmental matron) about the job specification and requirements for my replacement, we both noted that i wasn’t officially qualified enough to have been doing the job that i was actually doing (in fact a job that i had been a part of creating) and my matron noted that neither was she officially qualified enough for her job !. So we had a good laugh about that at the time and it is true that many nurses of our era ‘cope’ extremely well because of the training that we had and often better than the more highly (degree qualified) nurses of today. That’s an argument that goes nowhere quite quickly but my side of it is a slight degree of frustration that i still regard myself as moderately uneducated today especially along the lines of the classics and humanities in higher education and somehow today i find that important.

What i am doing right now is attempting serious study in a subject taught within the humanities : specifically psychology and i am doing that right now through first the medium of attending online lectures , and that’s the Jordan Petersen link and secondly through actual serious reading. That brings me neatly around to the main event here and that is to explain who Dr Jordan Petersen here but before i give my view i would like you at least to see him yourself talking with someone else.

This is quite a long discussion with Joe Rogan, watch as much as you can because it explains a lot of why Jordan Petersen has become such a important personality in Canadian academia/politics let alone his very serious work in Psychology and his online lectures. I will also post a link to at least one lecture. Something i really admire about JP is that he clearly states his thoughts and encourages others to do the same : in fact he almost sets out the challenge that we should think-out and then write-out our thoughts and ideas so that they can be challenged !

So : who is Jordan Petersen and why is he important ?

Dr Jordan Petersen is a clinical psychologist with a practice in Ontario Canada and is also a professor of Psychology at the university of Toronto, how i came aware of him was through studying the internet as i mentionned earlier and seeing the growth of the highly strange SJW phenomenon in universities that seem to be totally against the idea of free speech and open dialogue. Where Petersen came to fore it was initially by speaking out against specific things that were and are happening within academia there and within the politics, especially the highly charged world of identity politics : it took me many internet hours to, even get a basic grasp of what is happening there and at some point will maybe give a brief run-down on how things stand although what i see already is some almost incredibly badly thought out things happening in actual Canadian law…check out Bill C16 if you will. While i am on the subject did you for example realise that Toronto has a ‘human rights’ commission that can charge and heavily fine ‘miscreants’ for things as crazy as incorrect (politically) speech and do so without having to use due process…..essentially kangaroo courts very much along the lines of communist show trials.

Politics aside and what i am really excited by is Dr Petersens series of freely available internet lectures actually filmed in class : the first one that i am following right now is all about personality in psychology so dips into the work of Freud and Jung, Rogers and Piaget and then Nietsche (i had only heard of the first 2). Alongside those lectures there is a whole series based on Dr Petersens first book (maps of meaning) essentially all about the extreme ideologies of the 20th century, i haven’t even got there yet and Petersen is racing ahead with an entirely new series which is a Psychological interpretation of the bible.

With the lectures i only seem to be able to follow about half an hour at a time and mainly because i have to stop and go look something up that will be obvious to the class but isn’t to me and then maybe go watch the entire lecture over again. I’m having to do a lot of reading , that’s fine as i enjoy reading. Its also a challenge to me to at least attempt to set out my thoughts clearly on any important subject so the third thing going on is that i try and write on a daily basis and not just here (i moderate another forum where we talk about self-reliance).

Last month i decided to do something completely new and become a patreon ‘patron’ and so support Dr Petersen’s work in a very small and practical way. It means that i get a few things in return for example access to the future authoring programme : i am already working on the past authoring programme, have just recieved PDF access to the book ‘Maps of Meaning’ and can join a monthly Q&A livestream…..i missed last night due to the time difference but have just caught up with it now.

The real exciting possibility is that i might be able to get a world class education in the humanities at a much lower cost than an impossible (for me) university education through Dr Petersen’s plans for a genuine online university but even now would say that its great to be intellectually engaged an reading at the level that i am. This whole thing does actually couple with something that i have tried to study in the past and that is clinical patient safety which has one foot firmly rooted in psychology so my new study now already gives me better insights into that.

Here is a short segment of a lecture that i might use to help introduce my next essay.

Comments :

Peter Cash wrote : ” Polite warning, be careful of the KTL syndrome which boldly goes etc.Peterson is a hero to some, (me) and to others an enermy of the state.My wife has had Jung, Nietzsche et al on her bookshelves since uni in the late 60’s . Easy to be a liberal from a wealthy family with a foundation, but is now appalled by the policticlly correct movement in her native land. C16, Profs being turfed on minor twitter issues , and now paying a admitted terrorist $10m for throwing a granade at US troops, sorry we say, you were poorly treated.I moved to Canada to get way from the political lefty UK in 1970, now have nowhere left to go.A case of the tail wagging the dirty wet dog, sorry about that, the sock man took me over for a mo.

Me : agreed and its why i studied the internet a lot before i started this. I un-subscribed from KTL precisely because of his political video’s and i guess there is a risk here that i am being hypocritical in side-slipping a politically loaded (potentially) post myself. The great thing with JP though is that his serious work is Psychology, his content plain to see and as far as i can see his commitment genuine. I was even discussing recently with my elderly mother how vicous the internet can be as soon as anyone dips a toe in personality politics and no : i have no intention of doing that but i can see a way of writing and being maybe a modern essayist. I nearly made a start when i was thinking about a (relatively) wealthy (thats me) person having to step over the inert body of a homeless person in a stinking stairwell in my own country and while our own government prop up rotten and failed nuclear armed states with foreign aid.

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Published by libertywabi

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Disclosure P.S.
My CBT trained MD (U of T) has been the best thing for me during the last several years of stuggling with the black dog. Boating, and dreaming of it have kept me going with the support of my expensively educated wife.
Kudos to JP of U of T. and Drs Bayer (CDN) and Beck(USA)

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